Tag: Dee Gordon

This was a trade Squids just had to make. I really wouldn’t feel good about contending with Joe Panik as my only 2B. Dee Gordon is a little sketchy in our format because he offers no power, but neither does Panik. At least Dee gets on base pretty good and racks up steals, which aren’t really valuable but are better than nothing. Gordon always finishes among the top 2B scorers even if it isn’t always in game changing fashion. I wouldn’t be surprised if Panik gets dumped back to auction now.

Speaking of auction. Is Adam Jones kept at $39? I’m not sure. Gordon will be able to play CF too and while he won’t hit the homers Jones will, they’re roughly the same guy in our scoring when all is said and done.

Either way, this helps Squids at minimal cost. It gives him a relatively inexpensive, useful player that offers some options and flexibility. For LB, I assume this was a salary dump. So good for him too for turning a presumed cut into some future value. Maybe next year he can join the dark side and sell the pick for auction budget.

Hustle’s Toxic $.02

Overall this trade was pretty fine for both teams. I like it slightly more for Long Ball here. Gordon, like Brinson, has to be one of the most traded players in Dynasty Grinders history ( Jesus Sucre and Brian Shaw not counted). I think Gordon was likely headed back to the auction, so getting a 2nd round pick is a good haul for a cut. For Squids, supplanting Paniks production seems like a good idea at this point, and Gordon is a decent option. I think if he would have held out until auction he could have got comparable production at 2b, but maybe not. It’s hard to fault him for wanting to be prepared at each position before the auction.

So after an offseason of quite, Squids picked up Dee and Did in one afternoon. That’s 3 Ds. D-Von, get tables.

Anyway I like this trade for Squids more than the first. This reminds me of the Ferns deal with Bailey earlier offseason where he bought Mannea for 20. Buying an $8 Didi for $15 is basically like paying $23 at auction for Didi, which I don’t think would be crazy if you didn’t have a SS. The upside is that squids only has to pay $10 for him next year, especially with greed sponge Gary Sanchez on his roster. I don’t hate the trade for Jordan, I think it was a natural consequence of the Corey Seager deal which I did not like for Jordan. In fact, if Dejong does what he did last year, there’s no way Jordan is going to miss Didi at all. $15 buys you a better need at auction, so I get it.

Andrew’s thoughts: This is about as even as a trade gets. Two young guys with as much upside as injury risk. I like Devon Travis a bit more personally, just because he’s got a better MLB track record and, well, because I got 16 starts of 6.69 Pt/G out of him last year for the low, low cost of some FAAB. Never forget.

Basically even money here; one team that wanted a pitcher gets a pitcher, and one team that wanted a 2B gets a 2B. This is exactly the type of trade this league needed to get the hot stove firing.

Hustle’s toxic $0.02: The trade seems fair enough. Long Ball now has Dynasty Grinders legend Devon Travis as his third 2nd basemen after Dee Gordon and Jose Ramirez, which doesn’t make a ton of sense unless you’re trading one away. Still makes more sense than paying double digit cash for him (on top of his salary) and dropping him a month into the season though.

Hydra picks up Tyler Skaggs, who is an interesting gamble at $9. The winner of this trade will pretty obviously come down to which of these guys have a better year, assuming they both get kept. The only losers are those that are reviewing it.

Almost a year ago to the day, Jordan wrote a post exploring Billy Hamilton‘s value in our league. To sum his piece up: Hamilton doesn’t have much value because his only offensive skill is stealing bases, and our scoring system does not reward those much (and in fact, penalizes caught stealings more heavily than it rewards the steals themselves).

So the first question then is: why aren’t SBs worth much here?

The short answer to that is, our scoring system uses linear weights, which tries to match how points are awarded to how valuable real life events are. I suggest pausing this post, reading this explanation of linear weights, and then coming back. It does a better job explaining it than I would, and the explanation is already written. So go do that, then come back.

…

OK, got it?

Now that you’ve read that and understand the philosophy behind our scoring mechanisms, let’s ask this question: what, then, are SBs worth? We do give points for them, so they aren’t worth nothing.

Of hitters with 1,000 plate appearances between 2014 and 2016 (235 qualified hitters), Hamilton ranks 219th in on-base percentage, 192nd in batting average, 217th in home runs, 232nd in slugging percentage, and 234th in wOBA. Objectively speaking, these numbers define Hamilton as one of the worst offensive players in all of baseball over the last three seasons.

Of course, he ranks first of that same group in stolen bases with 171. Dee Gordon comes in second with 152.

These two players are actually very interesting, because Gordon has proven valuable in our scoring while Hamilton has not. It’s not like Gordon has any pop at all. They have very similar infield hit and line drive percentages, but the dramatic difference is a whopping 14.8% disparity in ground ball percentage and fly ball percentage. Basically, by putting the ball on the ground more, Gordon avoids easy outs, gets singles instead, and ratchets up his points totals little by little.

(To be fair to Hamilton, he’s a tremendous defender. I guess ideally defense would be rolled into our scoring, but there’s just not a good way of doing that just yet.)

Anyway, in a category (4×4, 5×5, whatever) league where stolen bases count, Hamilton goes from being one of the worst offensive players in baseball to being a weapon that can singlehandedly win you a category. Current NFBC ADP data has him as the 12th outfielder off the board and the 54th overall player off the board. But we’ve already established that he has only one offensive skill, that that particular offensive skill is not particularly valuable to real life run scoring, and that literally every other component of his offensive profile ranks at or near the bottom of leaderboards over an ample three year period. So you see the flaw here? Like, it’s very, very clear, right?

Through the lens of our league’s scoring, let’s look at Hamilton over the last three years with (top) and without (bottom) stolen bases:

In 2014, Hamilton got caught stealing a bunch of times. Getting caught stealing a base is one of the worst things a baseball player can do on the offensive side of the ball, and so doing it 23 times in a year will wipe away most of the value provided by those successful steals. Even still, he added over 70 points in 2014 from his baserunning abilities. He’s been more efficient in the two seasons since.

Without the steals, Hamilton is just kinda… bad? He would have scored 288.2 points in 2015 and 417.1 points in 2016. Even with the steals, he’s not worth much. But in 2015 he gained 118.5 points from steals and in 2016 his totals were bumped up by 122. That’s a lot! His steals are essentially adding almost six per week to his totals. It seems small, but in 2016, the difference between being worth 418.1 points and 539.1 points might be rosterability. The former might not even warrant a spot. The latter seems like a useful bench piece.

The other problem with Hamilton specifically is that, because he’s such a horrible hitter, he lends himself to being used as a pinch runner. This means that he likely isn’t in the Reds’ lineup on a particular day, thus he’s not in your fantasy lineup that day, and maybe he pinch runs and steals a base or two. So he’s accruing those points, but your team isn’t. That matters.

But this isn’t about Hamilton. It’s about stolen bases. So let’s look at a couple guys near the top of the SB leaderboard in 2016…

Last year, Jonathan Villar led baseball with 62 stolen bases. But of qualified hitters, he also ranked 23rd in OBP and 42nd in wOBA. So SBs aside, he had quite a good season hitting the baseball. With SB and CS included, he scored 1,042.2 points last year. Without them, he scored 941.2. But while he led the league in steals, he also led the league in times caught stealing, so he sort of cannibalized some of the value of his stolen bases. Still though, what he did on the base paths added more than 100 points to his total. That’s significant.

One of the most efficient base stealers last year was, surprisingly, Paul Goldschmidt. He swiped 32 bags and only got caught 5 times. With those factored in, he amassed 1,197.1 points and without them he would’ve accrued 65 fewer. So that’s 6.5 points per week which, again, is quite a lot even if it doesn’t seem like much.

My take away from this is that stolen bases actually are valuable in our league, but the offensive profile that goes with them must be sound. It’s not really a new revelation, rather confirmation of an existing one. Being fast and fast alone does not (and I’d argue should not) morph you into a valuable player, but being a quality hitter that is also fast can provide a nice opportunity to grab some extra points along the way.

Betternamelater

The winner for Clayton Kershaw was always going to be a contender. As I’ve stated before and again. He’s almost guaranteed to be a value. I had him realistically rated as high as $150. Getting him for $117 hurts in some ways, but the team with a better name in the works, made out like bandits on a few auctions.

Kershaw is the best player in the league. Danny Salazar, Marcus Stroman and Steven Matz are all really good and interesting. I consider them all tier 2 pitchers, but if they all ended up in tier one at the end of the season I will not be surprised. I do not love Alex Wood, but between him and Nathan Eovaldi you have a solid number five and I’d be okay with Jorge De La Rosa as my sixth when he’s out of Colorado. Weeks when Kershaw pitches twice, there’s not many pitching staffs that will out-duel. He’s just so damn good. The bullpen may or may not hold this staff back. Hector Rondon has a lot of good outings, and some seriously bad ones. Joaquin Benoit is pitching in Seattle, but currently does not have a secured role.

Depth – Alright

The depth here is set to be alright. The positional flexibility plays well here. There’s no backup 2b or SS here. How many plate appearances will be left on the cutting room floor, or only slightly better, left at replacement level. Probably too many. But that could be easily patched. There is a good chance a few of these guys become legit starters as well.

Why 2016 would be bad…

May the good lord forbid, but if Kershaw gets hurt. I mean I don’t even know what else to write. For any team if 22% of their budget was hurt early in the season for the whole season they would be easy choice as sunk. Same problem lies here. For the sake of the argument say the young three guys behind him hold up the pitching staff. Well it gets bad if Gonzalez and Granderson under perform. If Edwin Encarnacion goes missing, or worse, Machado has knee issues.

Why 2016 would be good…

Kershaw doesn’t even have to repeat 2015, just has to be close. Salazar, Stroman and Matz all get to 25+ starts as at least tier 2 guys. Machado remains awesome, the hitters all hit above their floors and this team should be pretty solid. The question marks are probably personal preference, but it is hard to argue against he value on almost all the buys. But it hinges on, well…